


i wanna be my own redeemer

by microcastles



Category: Dead To Me (TV)
Genre: F/F, not so much slow burn as crash and burn, porn and plot, some emotional abuse, some substance abuse too
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:34:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26786791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/microcastles/pseuds/microcastles
Summary: If people like Eleanor and Steve could be understood as sketches, filled out with blunt shapes, Jen is something closer to pointillism. With each of them, Judy believed that she earned their resentment, that she was obligated to take it inside of her and soften it so nobody else would have to. When she tries to summon the anger she should have at Jen, the coil of it goes slack. There is a Jen before and after Ted, before and after Judy’s confession, before and after Steve, and they are inextricable. Every piece of her informs the other.
Relationships: Judy Hale/Jen Harding
Comments: 18
Kudos: 36





	1. split the difference

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> brought to you by projection, an embarrassingly small amount of bourbon, and the recent "missing scene" fics. i like when we see judy's anger and want to explore more of it. title from sufjan stevens' "video game.”

Judy learned early on how to reconcile the barbed edges of people she loves. There is the Eleanor who slips out of the motel room they share while Judy feigns sleep, returning soon after with a pancake breakfast from McDonald’s; this Eleanor presses a kiss to the top of Judy’s head and speaks in awed tones about how the late morning air smells like the sea. There is another, separate Eleanor who can bend the knots of culpability until Judy is the only one to blame for her innate restlessness, her failed stabs at normalcy. More often, there is the shape of Eleanor’s absence and the leaden weight it carries.

Sitting across from her mother in the dim visitation room that morning, Judy allowed these Eleanors to coalesce. She tried to resist forcing them apart again when Eleanor calls her “Judy Ann” or when she met her eyes with a syrupy sweetness, and her instincts, buried deep under the sediment of habitual optimism, were rewarded when that sweetness gave way to calculated menace.

Steve’s disparate parts still haven’t come together. Maybe, in order to grieve him, he has to remain dismembered. Judy nearly inhales what remains of her joint when the visual occurs to her; some of Steve is in the forest, buried amongst a corporeal history of Los Angeles gang violence, some of him scattered in the calm seas part way between Dana Point and Avalon, and some of him sizzled in industrial grade drain cleaner. Judy laughs, punctuating the stream of smoke she exhales, gazing out over the pool toward an indiscernible point in the night sky. She balked at Jen’s suggestion that he be transported in a suitcase when, in some sense, Steve had been split across three or four different duffel bags for years.

Jen is trickier. Her capacity for care and for harm stem from the same bottomless reservoir. She’s like a dog that, when threatened, bites with the aim to kill, then licks inadequately at the wound.

After their argument, she kept saying, “It’s okay, baby,” half-carrying Judy from the car to her room. She crawled into bed beside Judy and pressed her nose to the top of Judy’s head, slinging an arm around her waist. “It’s okay.”

Judy allowed herself to be held. Maybe it was true; she makes no distinction between love and attention, especially the kind that cuts her to the bone. She deserves any hurt she’s dealt. Any love she receives is incidental.

Then, “incidental” is not how it felt, with Jen’s hand on her hip. Her tenderness plainly welled up out of guilt, Judy thought absently, but it’s as innate to her as her anger. Her love is often clumsy. It has, almost always, to be on her own terms. It made the way she held Judy like water in her hands no less genuine.

Thinking it through, the warm weight of Jen beside her like a tether amidst roils of self-reproach, Judy steadied her breathing. Another feeling bubbled up inside of her, a kind of anger without direction. She rolled over to face Jen for the first time since she collapsed against her in the car. “What do we do now?” she said. Her voice was hoarse, but level.

Jen’s face was neutral, her gaze focused fuzzily on Judy’s lips. She met Judy’s eyes, mouth parted slightly. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “But you should try to get some rest.”

Judy dreamt, as she had before, that Steve found them curled up in Jen’s bed. The room was impossibly dark; she could only just see the outline of his broad shoulders, looming over them. Judy’s arms were too heavy to raise, fingers too stiff to curl into a fist; somewhere at the very base of her consciousness, she doubted she could hurt him even if she had to. When she tried to scream, no noise passed from between her lips. As Steve lunged for Jen’s throat, a shot rang out from an unseen gun.

She awoke sobbing into Jen’s shoulder. Jen traced a nonsense pattern into her back with her fingertips, saying,“Jude, Jude, it’s okay.”

She surged with an urgent energy. She brought a hand to cup Jen’s cheek, as if to reassure herself that Jen was really there. Without thinking past the shadow of impulse, Judy kissed her.

It was a long moment before Jen pulled away and said,”Wait.” Dread like liquid mercury settled into Judy’s stomach. Jen’s eyes searched her own, looking placid and wide in the moonlight. Then, she brought her lips to Judy’s again with an aching slowness, and the heavy feeling dissipated.

Judy could taste the salt of her own tears on her lips, and felt the glow of her flushing cheeks. She pressed open-mouthed kisses to the side of Jen’s neck, sloppy and full of teeth, dragging quiet gasps out of her that Judy had never heard her make before. Jen’s hand tightened in her hair.

“This okay?” she said.

“Yes,” Jen breathed.

“Are you sure? You’ll tell me if you want me to stop?” Judy said. She trailed one hand down Jen’s waist.

“Shut up,” said Jen. Then, “God, I don’t ever want you to stop.”

In a fluid movement, Judy straddled the blades of Jen’s hips, teeth scraping harshly at her neck. She was overwhelmed with want and with fury, with an ineffable feeling that could only be expressed by slipping two fingers into Jen with little pretense. Jen moaned softly into her shoulder, legs already trembling.

Together, they slid Jen’s trousers off and she added a third finger, arching them further inward with each thrust. “Jesus _fuck_ , Jude,” Jen said. Judy trailed her teeth along the join of her neck and shoulder, pulling her satin shirt collar aside only enough to plant kisses along her clavicle. Her hips jerked when Jen reached between her thighs and pressed slow circles into her clit through the fabric of her underwear, not nearly hard enough. “Already so wet,” she heard Jen mumble. Her breath caught. Something about it felt wrong.

Judy pulled away, pulled her fingers out, inching down the length of the bed until she was positioned between Jen’s legs. She sucked a mark, dull and red, into the toned skin of Jen’s thigh before pressing her mouth to Jen’s clit with the same intensity. It didn’t take long before her legs slammed against the sides of Judy’s head, hips bucking, riding out her orgasm on the flat of Judy’s tongue.

Jen ran her hands over Judy’s breasts and the expanse of her torso, pressing slow, reverent kisses to the underside of her jaw as if trying to commit her shape to memory. Judy was breathless, still thrumming with an unidentifiable energy. “I appreciate what you’re doing,” she said. Jen’s most sincere apologies aren’t often verbal; she wondered before she could stop herself whether or not this was something Ted understood. “But just fuck me.”

Jen, shoving Judy’s underwear down with one hand, obliged.

If people like Eleanor and Steve could be understood as sketches, filled out with blunt shapes, Jen is something closer to pointillism. With each of them, Judy believed that she earned their resentment, that she was obligated to take it inside of her and soften it so nobody else would have to. When she tries to summon the anger she should have at Jen, the coil of it goes slack. There is a Jen before and after Ted, before and after Judy’s confession, before and after Steve, and they are inextricable. Every piece of her informs the other.

Judy flicks her spent joint into the pool, fishing it out with cupped hands barely a moment later. Inside, the house is dark, the kitchen filled with the refrigerator’s hum. She eyes the emergency binder she left lying closed on the dining table. The weed makes her feel light, like floating inevitably upwards after diving into the bottom of a pool. It does little to mitigate the tendrils of guilt that start to settle into her chest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some things:  
> \- i have a tenuous grasp on verb tenses. i also don't understand how scenes fucking work  
> \- this is likely to continue as post s2 vignettes. i know how i want it to end. what happens in the middle? god knows, but i've been staring at this segment for too long  
> \- bonus points to whoever identifies the (mostly unconscious) phoebe bridgers references


	2. i want to be well

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter title is another sufjan reference (sorry, @bluebluebaby). some descriptions of emotional abuse and alcoholism, though not really any more than is in the show to begin with.

Judy’s high dissipated as she set about making the boys breakfast, the tranquil mindlessness of measuring out flour and butter and the feel of the whisk in her hand the only buffer remaining between her and a kind of paralyzing shock. She lost count of how many beginnings of panic attacks she swallowed, how many times she cycled through the stages of grief, some of them all at once, by the time Jen strode into the kitchen, looking dusty, and frenzied, and radiant. Judy had been steeling herself to adopt a tender neutrality with Charlie and Henry, informed if not by maternal instinct, then by a lifetime of setting aside her own feelings. With Jen’s return came an overwhelming sense of relief, permission to let herself feel anything or nothing at all.

For now, she focuses on the way the sun feels against her skin. It’s a comforting contrast to the cool, coastal breeze that picks up most afternoons, rendering the beach itself temporarily uninhabitable. If she closes her eyes, tricks herself into mistaking the sound of passing cars for ocean waves, it produces almost the same effect; she is unglued in time with Jen beside her, filled with the satisfied exhaustion of having spent a morning slamming her body into ocean waves, treading the boundary between sleep and not.

Then, Jen says,”I can’t believe you’re sitting here,” and Judy is plucked from her reverie. She regards Jen with dazed concern. “How can you even look at me?” She fumbles for the phrasing she rehearsed, barely having expected to put it to practice so soon.

“Judy, I’m so sorry that I lied to you and let you blame yourself. It’s a fucking horrible thing to do.”

“It is,” Judy agrees tentatively.

“You didn’t deserve that.”

“I didn’t.”

“If I were you, I would get up right now, and walk away, and never fucking talk to me again.” Fear and determination are set in Jen’s eyes, like she’s both daring and pleading with Judy to just leave.

“Well, I forgive you,” says Judy.

“What?” says Jen.

“I forgive y--”

“Oh, shut up.”

“No, you shut up.” Judy bristles with raw irritation. “You don’t get to tell me how to feel right now, not after the morning we’ve both had. I don’t want to carry around any more pain. I’m tired of feeling sad and hurt, and resenting you would just be punishing myself.”

“I don’t want you to do that.”

“I don’t want _you_ to do that,” Judy says.

“How can I not?”

“I think you have to find a way to forgive yourself.” Jen wrinkles her nose. “Yeah, it’s gross, but I feel like you’ve been given a second chance.”

Jen scoffs. “It’s not like I fuckin’ deserve one.”

“Maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s about earning it. I’m sure there’s stuff I have to work on, too.”

“Oh yeah,” says Jen, too quickly.

“ _Okay_ , let’s hear it. I’m open.”

“You need to start saying ‘no’ more.”

The corners of Judy’s mouth pull into a deep grimace. “I know.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“It is hard.”

“But what you just said, about not wanting to carry around pain anymore? You shouldn’t have to carry around anyone else’s pain either.”

Judy’s grimace turns, inescapably, into a smirk. Her annoyance translates easily into antagonism. “Does this mean you’re getting a therapist?”

“Oh, shut up. No. Maybe.” Jen sighs. “God. I know it’s early, but can we start drinking?”

“As the adult child of an addict, this is probably one of those things I should start saying no to.” Judy giggles as Jen’s eyes go wide, not fully knowing herself whether she means this to be a joke. The line that demarcates substance abuse is always there in her head, faint and ambiguous, often disregarded. She wonders if Jen sees it, too--she must, at some point, have glanced at the small mountain of wine bottles permanently in their recycling bin with a sense of unease, or self-reproach, or both--and what form it might take for her; a crumbling threshold, a moving goalpost, an inevitability. Whatever it is, it’s another thing they’ll never talk about.

“But yes,” decides Judy. “Please.”

She opts for a heavy hand of kahlua in her latte, where Jen’s concoction smells like a near even split between coffee and whiskey. She savors the warmth of the mug in her palms, pressing it to her chest as the wind picks up. Her heart beats steadily against the ceramic. It quickens as Jen stretches her legs across the outdoor sofa, resting them in Judy’s lap.

“So, we should probably talk about last night.”

Judy nearly chokes. In the fog of all the half-stoned preparations she made, she hadn’t considered whether or not to bring this up, or how much sincerity to let shine through her unguarded. She loves Jen without question, but that love snags against the suspicion that Jen is right--that she pours herself boundlessly into anyone who gives her the scarcest bit of attention--like thread on a loose nail. “I thought I was going to jail,” she says cautiously, opting for a veneer of levity.

“I thought _I_ was going to jail.”

“Aw, so was it, like, a mutual goodbye fuck?”

Jen eyes her, her face unreadable. “Is that what you want it to be?”

“I don’t--” Judy stutters. “I don’t know if I should tell you what I want it to be. Look, Jen, we don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to. I honestly didn’t think we ever _would_ talk about it.”

“I want to. I want you to be able to tell me, when you’re ready,” says Jen, sighing. “It’s like I’ve been, I don’t fucking know, sleepwalking through the last ten years of my life, and I think you’re right. I think I’ve been given a second chance.” She holds Judy’s stare. “I want to deserve what I get.”

“That’s… good of you,” Judy says. Her stomach flutters with something like hope and dread. The part of her that reads shifts in tone, in body language like a topographical map tenses, so she adds, “I really appreciate your willingness to discuss it.”

“Jesus, Judy, you don’t have to get all conflict resolution coach about it,” Jen spits. Her eyes soften the moment the words leave her lips. “But I mean it.”

“I know you do.”

“And I’ll… work on the mouthiness.”

With Steve, it followed what Judy now recognized as the well-trod path of violent men: tiptoeing around the tenuous border of his patience, a controlled outburst over something small (her purchase of yet another Buddha statue, once), unexpected reserves of tenderness and the overwhelming conviction that nobody deserved him quite the way she did. 

Jen isn’t like that. Judy hasn’t decided yet what Jen is like, after last night, unable to fully square those revelations with the rest of her, even as they confirmed what a part of Judy suspected all along. 

“Well, hey,” Judy says, breaking the silence that had fallen between them with a preemptive smirk tugging at her lips. “I happen to like your mouth sometimes.”

Jen frowns, flushing a deep red.


End file.
